Battle-Retrospect, and Other Poems/Anti-climax
ANTI-CLIMAX.
Red embers crackle on the hearth. The dark
Invades the homely cottage living room.
Across the chequered window-pane I mark
An acre of the sky with stars a-bloom.—
And I have ventured many a wan surmise
To-day on life and death, and there has crept
A sadness on me from the sunset skies
To think how long old dreams of mine have slept,
And how the glory of the past fades out,
Those mighty apparitions that appeared
In days more grandiose, and how a drought
Of faith has left our spirits bruised and seared.
For I have loved, how deeply have I loved,
The haunted spots of faith and poetry,
Have looked on Delphi's rock, and musing roved
By Rydalwater and by Domremy;
And I have known the august moods of war,
When we deployed upon the breathless heights
Of man's experience and laid by a store
Of countless dawns and noons and starry nights
Touched with Homeric action on far fronts
In company with the heroic dead,
Living a thousand lives in those few months
Whose pageantry to-day, alas, is fled.
And I remember old simplicities
And whitenesses of soul that mock me now,
And feel remorse for mediocrities
And spurn the gods to whom peace bids me bow.
And I remember ancient loyalties
And ardent ships of hope that have been wrecked
On sordid shores, and brooding much on these,
Prospect grows pallid before retrospect,
And all the hallowed passions of the years,
And all ideal longings, and dear pain,
And dedicated griefs, and secret tears,
Sweep back to overpower me again.
... Yet all that we have loved is part of us,
And those great hours are builded in our lives,
That vanished dream is yet the heart of us
And through the present still for utterance strives.
Of those great things the spirit makes its bread,
There pastures, and a parasite it preys
On glory, and grown sordid lifts its head
Reproached, transfigured by its yesterdays;
Learning that these same hidden souls of ours
Are wide terrains of spiritual wars
Where grow expectancies beyond the hours,
And prospects incommensurate with the stars.